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Volume 4, Number 4
April 1991

Ellen Chances, "Keeping the Lies Alive”

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THE HARRIMAN IISHTUTE

FURUIT]

Keeping the Lies Alive:

Case Studies of the Psychology of Stalinism
in Contemporary Soviet Literature and Film

by Ellen Chances

April 1991

Volume 4, Number 4

“.we have been taught from
an early age
‘not to be aware’...”

“.Taising a child to be
unaware...serves to mask
the abuse...”

“.the...goal is to uphold
the defense mechanisms of
generations of fathers."

“The greater the refusal to
face the past, the more incom-
prehensible its neurotic and
psychotic manifestations in
the next generation. This is
true for the children of both
the persecutors and the
victims."
—Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not
Be Aware: Society's Betrayal
of the Child!

1 Tr. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum (New York: New American Library,1986). Citations from pp.150,146,147,180, respectively.

THE W. AVERELL HARRIMAN INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY OF THE SOVIET UNION
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The book Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children

of the Third Reich, contains a series of interviews with
people whose fathers had been Nazis heavily involved in
committing atrocities during World War II. The inter-
views, conducted from 1985 to 1987 by Daniel Bar-On,
an Israeli psychologist who is a Holocaust survivor, are
moving testimonies to the ways in which Hitler’s ghastly
policies of murder have continued to affect, forever after,
the lives and psyches of these “children” of Nazi per-
petrators. When Bar-On began his research in 1984, he
could only find information about the psychology of
children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, but
none about the psychological impact of the Hitler era
upon Nazis and their offspring. “ Legacy of Silence
describes the tragedy of a post-Hitler Germany whose
silence about the Holocaust has ensured that subsequent
generations — whether they be children of the tormented
Jewish victims of the concentration camps (Bar-On him-
self) or of the tormentor Nazi victimizers (the inter-
viewees) continue to endure the pain inflicted by Hitler
upon Germany many decadesago.
'Bar-On’s interviewees talk about their fathers’ and
sons’ committing suicide. They speak of and
demonstrate their emotional numbness. They reveal
deep psychological symptoms. One man, son of a Nazi,
admits that after Hitler’s defeat, he had inadvertently
overheard his father discuss with his mother whether or
not he should murder his family and take his own life in
order to avoid post-war Allied forces anti-Nazi retribu-
tion. After that time, the man admits, he had spent several
years of his boyhood in fear that the food being set before
him had been poisoned by his mother and/or by school
authorities. Most of the parents of these “children of the
Third Reich,” like German society-at-large, hid the truth
about their actions from their children. Bar-On docu-
ments, among other things, the profound, psychological-
ly traumatic consequences that the parents’ failure to
confront the truth had upon the children. Even when one
father did tell his son the truth, the son, raised in a society
of lies, in a society that had gone awry, did not believe
the father. Instead, he continued to have faith in the Nazi
lies that his youth groups were instilling in him.

Stalin’s legacy to his society duplicates, in terms of
psychological devastation, the sad history of ruined lives

that Hitler perpetrated on German society. It is to the
specifics of Stalin’s psychological effect upon Soviet
society, as reflected in a few key cultural contributions,
that I now turn.

During the summer of 1988, a new film,To Slay the
Dragon (Ubit’ drakona), opened in Moscow. Based on
playwright Evgenii Shvarts’ 1943-1944 drama, The
Dragon (Drakon)° , the movie ends with a clear, crisp
message: in order to attain freedom, each individual
must slay the personal dragon that lives within his/her
soul. Lancelot has given people freedom to kill the
dragons, but they themselves keep their dragons alive.
They themselves keep themselves enslaved.

This thought is not new to the current Soviet debates
about the effects of Stalin on society. During Brezhnev’s
reign, in 1967, for example, Soviet poet Evgenii Ev-
tushenko wrote a poem about an “Alaskan” blue fox on
a gray fur farm. “The blue fox is different from its gray
buddies, and it longs to be free or to trade its “traitor” blue
color for a conformist gray. One day, the fox notices that
the door to the cage is open, and it escapes. It tastes
freedom: “I played pranks, I barked nonsense/ at the
trees. I was my own true self./ And the iridescent snow
was unafraid/ that it was also very blue.”

The blue fox then realizes that it will never be free: “He
who’s conceived in a cage will weep for a cage,” and it
goes back to the cage, of its own free volition. The poem
ends with these words: “I would like to be naive, like my
father,/ but I was born in captivity: I am not him./ The
one who feeds me will betray me./ The one who pets me
will kill me.”

The idea of self-enslavement is also not new to the
history of the study of human behavior. We have only to
think of one of the most famous arguments about self-
enslavement ever to be advanced, Ivan’s Legend of the
Grand Inquisitor “poem” in Dostoevsky’s Brothers
Karamazov, where the grand inquisitor insists that people
prefer security to freedom. Many decades later and many
thousands of miles away, American psychologist Erich
Fromm’s Escape from Freedom highlighted the human
being’s desire to submit rather than to act freely.

2 Daniel Bar-On, Legacy of Silence (Cambridge, MA:Harvard U. Press,1989),p.9. Another book mentioned by Bar-On bears out the same

conclusions."The generation of the

tors treated their children to lies, silence, and dishonesty," writes Peter Sichrovsky, son of Viennese

Jews who had returned to Austria after World War II, in his book of interviews with both highly and not-so-highly placed German and Austrian
children of Nazis. Peter Sichrovsky, Born Guilty: Children of Nazi Families, tr. Jean Steinberg (London: I.B. Tauris,1988), p.14.

mm GO

“Po motivam Shvarts" (“Based on the Motifs of Shvarts”) serves as the subtitle of Mark Zakharov’s Mosfilm production.
“Monologue of a Polar Fox on an Alaskan Fur Farm," tr. John Updike with Albert C. Todd, in Yevtushenko, Stolen Apples (Garden City,NY:

Doubleday, 1971),pp.173-6;Evgenii Evtushenko,"“Monolog golubogo pestsa na aliaskinskoi zveroferme,” Sobranie sochinenii v trekh

tomakh,IIStikhotvorenniia i poemy 1965-1972 (Moscow,1984),pp.187-8.

Mikhail Gorbachev has alluded to the particularly acute
form of this phenomenon that was generated by the Stalin
era. In his book, Perestroika, he asserts, “The difficulties
we are experiencing in the democratization process are
largely of our own making. We are all products of our
time, of a certain pattern of things and habits. Therefore
we say that we all have to change ourselves...” He sees
that the challenge of perestroika is not limited to the
political and economic arenas. Gorbachev admits,
“Psychological habits that have become ingrained over
the years cannot be abolished by any decree, even the
most formidable.”©

Other Gorbachev pronouncements pursue this theme.
In September, 1988, the Soviet leader pressed for radical
change, not only in agriculture, industry, the party and
the government, but “most of all — in people’s con-
sciousness, in their attitude ... toward themselves.”

Other people’s statements in other recent Soviet publi-
cations address the same issue. Literary critic Lev
Anninskii’s analysis of Vladimir Kornilov’s poetry, in a
1988 Novyi mir article, weaves into the discussion asser-
tions about the importance of individual responsibility.
He quotes a Kornilov poem whose gist is that when
freedom came, he was not ready.

A professor of psychology, writing in Novyi mir, argues
passionately for the necessity of a “perestroika of our
soul” (“perestroika nashei dushi”).? Writing in Kom-
munist, Professor Igor Kon of the USSR Academy of
Sciences Institute of Ethnography blames much of the
Soviet Union’s present-day social inertia on the diseased
genes of the Stalin legacy.!° In the darkest years of
Stalin’s purges, people were afraid, for good reason, to
utter their own opinions, to tell the truth about what they
were witnessing. They would convince themselves,
writes Kon, that all was well in the world when, in fact,
they knew that this was not the case. Kon states that it is
extraordinarily difficult for society to overcome the
decades of conformity bred by fear.

In March, 1989, Literaturnaia gazeta brought together
a group of Soviet clinical psychologists. Their round
table discussion centered on the psychological effects of
“the stagnation syndrome” on the ego.” One

Ellen Chances

psychologist, E. Novikov, admitted that clients would
often ask whether a child should be raised “...according
to truth or according to life.”

In another context, Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller
has described the mechanism by which children’s per-
ceptions of the world become distorted when adults lie to
them. Miller writes that adults lie and make children
believe that the truth that they are seeing is not the truth.
Adults protect the societal distortions that make up their
world. Children are left confused, with their truth denied
by those people whom they most trust. The result, accord-
ing to Miller, is devastating to the healthy development
of the personality.

A significant part of Miller’s book, Thou Shalt Not Be
Aware: Society’ s Betrayal of the Child, has to do with her
attack on Freud for his refusal to accept what his patients
were revealing to him about their childhood histories of
sexual abuse. Miller explains that rather than accept the
truth of case after case after case of wornen coming to
him and talking about having been sexually abused by
the adults closest to them, Freud constructed the seduc-
tion theory. As children, these women, according to
Freud, had really not been abused; rather, it was the
children who were making up sexual fantasies. It was the
children who were, in fantasy, seducing the adults.

Miller argues that in creating his seduction theory,
Freud simply could not accept the truth of what the adults
had done. Instead of exposing the adults’ crimes, Freud
placed the blame on the victims (it’s all in your mind —
you’re making up these incidents — you are not seeing
what you are seeing). In this way, explains Miller, Freud
was upholding the construct of societal lies and was
contributing to the psychological damage inflicted upon
the children. Miller states, “Change in society is brought
about by uncovering and recognizing the truth in its
entirety, not by manipulative methods based on accep-
tance of social taboos.”!?

The particulars of Freud’s seduction theory, childhood
sexual abuse, and the restructuring of psychoanalytic
theory lead us to a very different world from that of the
particulars of the history of Stalin’s abuses and of con-
temporary Soviet societal restructuring. Yet Alice

Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World, updated ed. (New York: Harper & Row,1988),p.60.

Ibid., p.90.

5
6
iz: "V druzhestvennoi obstanovke. Rech’ tovarishcha Gorbacheva M.S.," Pravda, 29 September 1988, p.2.
8

“Pred voleiu i bedoi," Novyi mir, Secsgepottinie « presatss.

9 G. Shakurov, “Sotsiosentrizm ili sotsializm?”

10 = “Psikhologiia sotsial’noi inertsii," Kommunist, January 1988,pp.64-75.
11 "“Kruglyistol’L.G.’ Naedine so vsemi," Literaturnaia gazeta, 1

Novyi mir,No.7,1988,p.266.

1989,p.10.

12 Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, p.303. I am extremely grateful to Troup Matthews for first introducing me to Miller’s writings. Miller also devotes part
of another of her books to Hitler and German society of Hitler’s time, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence,

tr. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum (New York: FarrarStraus,& Giroux,1989). Much scholarly work remains to be done on comparative studies
of Hitler and Stalin, of Germany and the Soviet Union in their respective attitudes to the Hitler era and to the Stalin era during and after the

dictators’ lifetimes.

The Harriman Institute Forum

Miller’s major findings, in their broad implications, are
applicable to the Soviet situation.

A key problem of perestroika, as chronicled by the
movie To Slay the Dragon and stated by Gorbachev,
Anninskii, and Kon, is the psychological scar that cuts
across Soviet society. People have been psychologically
traumatized by Stalin’s terrors, and these people have
passed on the wounds to their children. The documenta-
tion of this phenomenon is the focus of two significant
contributions to contemporary Soviet culture, Russian
writer Andrei Bitov’s novel Pushkin House (Pushkinskii
dom) and Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze’s film
Repentance (Pokaianie).

Each of these works was created before Gorbachev
came to power. Abuladze’s movie was produced in
1984), and Bitov’s novel was completed in 1971. The
Soviet public was denied access to each of these works
during the pre-Gorbachev era. Abuladze’s film was not
allowed to be released. Non-problematic portions of
Bitov’s novel appeared in scattered Soviet journals
during the 1970s, but the novel as a whole was not
allowed to be published in the USSR. It came out in
Russian in the United States in 1978.4

It was only with the advent of glasnost that many
daring, honest works of art that appraised the legacy of
Stalin’s tyrannical policies ceased to be “shelved.”
Abuladze’s movie was released in 1987, with the help of
prominent politician Eduard Shevardnadze.!> Bitov’s
novel was published in the distinguished Soviet journal
Novyi mir in 1987, and it was published in the Soviet
Union in book form in 1989.'°

Bitov’s Pushkin House plots the painful disease of
Stalinism as it downs generation after generation of
Soviet citizens." The novel concerns Lev Nikolaevich
Odoevtsev (Leva, for short), a Russian literature graduate
student in the Academy of Sciences Leningrad Literary
Institute, Pushkin House. Bitov focuses on three sig-
nificant incidents in Leva’s life, each of which is con-
tained in one of the three major “sections” (razdely) of
the novel, each named after a nineteenth-century Russian

literary masterpiece. The first, “Fathers and Sons” (Ottsy
i deti), addresses Leva’s relationship to the past; the
second, “A Hero of Our Time” (Geroi nashego vremeni),
his relationship to the present; and the final section turns
to his relationship to his creative gifts.

In an interview, Bitov spoke about Pushkin House:
“..the worst kind of slave is one who suppresses his own
rebellion. This is, generally, what the novel is about. It
is the story of a slave who might have avoided that fate.
A strange kind of mutation has occurred in people. One
must sort out things in society, but, primarily, in one’s
own self. Even Chekhov said that all his life he had been
squeezing the slave out of his system, drop by drop...”!8

The mutation about which Bitov speaks in the novel is
that caused by Stalin. In the course of the entire novel,
he never once mentions Stalin by name (“Perhaps the real
meaning [of Pushkin House — E.C.] is between the
lines,” Bitov declared)!?, yet the implication is that it is
Stalin who has ruined people’s capacity to live a normal
life.

From the beginning of the book, Bitov shows the way
in which Leva’s life has been thrown out of kilter by the
disjunctures brought about by the Soviet dictator. Bitov
writes that Leva’s life resembled a thread that started to
coil up into rings (kol’ tsa)”°, each ring piling up on the
first ring. As we read Pushkin House, we realize that the
first ring, the ring upon which all else falls, is Stalin. The
lethal quality of that ring is repeatedly alluded to, as the

narrator brings up a legend about scorpions. According

to the legend, the insects commit suicide by turning in on
themselves and stinging themselves. We read, “Em-
bodied experience stings itself, like a scorpion, and goes
to the bottom. And if you have already had the misfor-
tune to acquire it (experience...), don’t embody it, be-
cause you won’t repeat it — it'll repeat you!”
Destructive and self-destructive rings — vicious circles
—symbolize the destructive and self-destructive
relationships that plague Leva’s life. And, writes Bitov,
it is “HE” that “unites us all”.2? It is “HE” that caused
the unhealthy relationships to be formed. The implica-

13 Le cinéma georgien, ed. Jean Radvanyi (Paris:Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou,1988),p.146.
14 Pushkinskii dom (Ann Arbor,MI:Ardis,1978). An English translation was published in 1978. Andrei Bitov, Pushkin House, tr. Susan Brownsberger

(New York: Farrar,Straus,&Giroux,1987).

15 The film was first produced for television since Abuladze thought it would not be approved by the central film agency, Goskino. Karen
Rosenberg,"Repentance," In These Times, 16-22 March 1988,p.24.Joseph Corintelli, editor-in-chief of Georgian television for the past 12 years,
explains that Shevardnadze first encouraged Abuladze to work on the film and then, for a time, discouraged its release, claiming that the time
was not yet ripe for the film to come out. Joseph Corintelli,“Georgia Today: People,Art,Literture,"Columbia University Harriman Institute talk, 23

March 1989.

16 Novyi mir, No.10,1987,pp.3-92;No.11,1987,pp.55-91;No.12,1987,pp.50-110.

17 Ananalysis of Pushkin House is included in my book, The Ecology of Inspiration:The Shapes of Andrei Bitov’s Prose, forthcoming in the series, Studies

of the Harriman Institute.

20 Pushkinskiidom, p.160.
21 ~—s Ibid. pp.283-4.

18 fe Bitov:In Search of Lost Meaning," interviewer Vadim Prudnikov, Books and Art in the USSR,vo.3/58,1988,p.34.

tion is that this “HE” is Stalin. A key message of Bitov’s
book is that if the first ring is composed of lies, all the
other rings that form on top of it will also be composed
of lies. And that first lethal ring is Stalin.

In recently discussing a literary hero, Bitov declared,
“A hero is not a person. A hero is not the author. Perhaps
he is the portrait of a generation.”~° And indeed, Leva is
the representative of a generation, a particular generation
that was born at the height of Stalin’s terrors. Both Leva
and Bitov were born in 1937. This generation was
brought up in the atmosphere of fear, lies, and betrayal
that gripped Soviet society. In fact, Bitov considered
calling Pushkin House by different titles, The Lie or
Betrayal.

Because of Stalin, all realms of Leva’s life — in the
personal, creative, and familial spheres — were distorted.
And the novel documents the way in which the Stalin era
sent ripples of irreparable psychological damage through
the whole of Soviet society. The way in which Bitov
accomplishes his task is to show, in the first section, the
way in which Stalin had taken a toll on Leva’s family life.
He shows that the normal continuity of generation to
generation — grandfather to father to son — had been
broken.

Leva’s grandfather, Modest Platonovich Odoevtsev,
had been arrested and had spent thirty years in concentra-
tion camps. He returns to Leningrad, a destroyed, nasty,
drunken old man. He does not live with his family, but
rather, with Koptelov, his former camp guard. Leva’s
father had built his career by criticizing his own father’s
ideas. Koptelov is a good person, Modest Platonovich
explains to Leva, because “twice he didn’t kill me...”

All his life, Leva had not even known that his
grandfather was alive; his parents had hidden the truth
from him. He goes to visit him, eager to worship both
man and mind, and instead, is subjected to a barrage of
drunken, vilifying accusations, insults, and attacks. Leva
gets drunk and throws up in the taxi on his way home.
When he gets home, he refuses to talk to his parents about
the visit, even though he knows that they are eager to hear
news about the elderly Odoevtsev. Leva feels that that
day, he had “become worse.””>

The reader sees that because of the disease of Stalinism
visited upon society, family ties are broken.

22 ‘Ibid.,p.251.

23 “In Search of Lost Meaning," p.34.
24 Pushkinskiidom,p.69.

25 Ibid.,

Ellen Chances

Grandfathers don’t live with their children and
grandchildren. One human being likes another because
“twice he didn’t kill me...” Children make their reputa-
tions by betraying their fathers. People live a domestic
life of lies: a father does not tell his son that his
grandfather is alive. And children suffer the consequen-
ces of the lies by which society lives.

In the course of “‘Fathers and Sons,” Bitov introduces
us to “Uncle Dickens” (“Diadia Dikkens”), another
elderly alcoholic of Modest Platonovich’s generation,
who had been arrested and had spent many years in
Stalin’s concentration camps. A lonely old man without
family, he lives with the Odoevtsevs, serving the function
of a sort of surrogate grandfather. He, too, had been
permanently scarred, emotionally, for he was incapable
of providing emotional support to anyone. All of his
energies, explains Bitov, are directed toward making
certain that he does not fall apart. This man, too, plays a
role in the harm done to Leva. At the point when Leva
most needs gentle comfort and support, Uncle Dickens is
not capable of giving of himself to the young Leva.

Leva’s visit to his grandfather forms one of the diseased
rings that piles up on that rotten firstring.”° In the section
of Pushkin House entitled “Fathers and Sons,” we see that
the “father” Stalin had abused his “children,” and that the
process was passed on from generation to generation of
Soviet father and son. Bitov writes, “Father was the time
itself. Father, papa, cult — what other synonyms are
there?” *’

“A Hero of Our Time,” the second section of Bitov’s
novel, continues to document the devastation wrought
upon Leva’s life. In this part of the novel, Bitov
demonstrates the way in which Leva’s relationships with
his peers are damaged. Since, in his family life, he had
been wounded by those who themselves had suffered
abuse, Leva behaves in ways that are both destructive and
self-destructive. Because he has been lied to, he lies to
those who treat him decently. Albina loves him dearly,
and he repays her kindness by inflicting cruelty upon her.
Faina does not love Leva, and he is drawn to her, even
as, time after time, she inflicts psychological wounds
upon him. She lies to him, and he lies to Albina. The lies
bred in society continue to multiply. Mitishatiev, a
schoolmate and later, graduate school colleague of
Leva’s, is the personification of evil. Leva knows this,

.102
26 = “Kol 1a is also the Russian word for “circle.” Thus, Bitov’s image of the “first ring” resonates to another novel with a circular literary image that
treats the theme of Stalinist labor camps, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's First Circle (V kruge pervom). And, of course, Solzhenitsyn’s novel resonates to

Dante’s In , an earlier work about the circles of hell.
27 ~~ Pushkinskii dom, p.56.

The Harriman Institute Forum

and yet, time after time, he falls under Mitishatiev’s
power.

The third part of Bitov’s novel, “Poor Horseman” (Bed-
nyi vsadnik)? turns to the tragic consequences of the
Stalin era for Leva’s creative gifts. Bitov implies, even
in his insertion of epigraph after epigraph quoted from
previous Russian literature, that as a result of the endless
rings of humiliation, Leva is not able to be original.
Everything, writes Bitov, is a substitute for something
real. Ata cultural event for the intelligentsia, the people
who were supposed to be there were not, and in their
place, others showed up. A poem read at this event
includes a reference to the fact that something false is
substituted for something real, that everything is upside
down.

An article that Leva writes, discussed in detail in Push-
kin House, contains some unoriginal ideas, for Leva,
explains the narrator, did not have access to scholarly
works that had been suppressed since the Stalin era.

In his novel, Bitov has thrown the spotlight on the many
facets of Leva’s life that had gone awry because of Stalin,
the original perpetrator of the lie. And Bitov
demonstrates, all through the novel that was almost called
The Lie or Betrayal, that once the “thread” of lies and
betrayal is woven into the fabric of a society by a “father,”
that thread weaves itself around and finally chokes the
children of that society who have been left with the legacy
of the lie.

According to Bitov, it is only possible to break out of
the lies by stepping away from the framework altogether.
Itis only possible to acquire freedom by declaring oneself
free of that system. Leva could have become free by
refusing to acknowledge Mitishatiev’s power over him.
Leva himself, writes Bitov, was hurt by Mitishatiev be-
cause he /et himself be hurt by him.

Leva’s tragedy is that given the vulnerability to life that
had been bestowed upon him by Stalin, the generation of
the warped grandfathers, and that of the warped fathers,
he was incapable of breaking away from the distortions.
He dies, victim of a duel with Mitishatiev, embodiment
of the Stalinist forces unleashed in Soviet society.
Bitov’s narrator, justly, claims that the most important
theme of the novel is dislocation.

Abuladze’s film, Repentance, deals with the same
phenomenon, the societal dislocations spewed forth by a
tyrannical dictator. Couched in allegorical terms, the
movie tells the story of a city mayor whose physical

description and tactics represent a blend of Stalin, Hitler,
Mussolini, and Beria. Like Beria, he wears a pince-nez,
loves opera, and kills the husband of a woman to whom
he is attracted. Like Stalin, he terrorizes society by
carrying out random arrests of “enemies of the people”
in the name of the common good. Like Hitler, he has a
tiny mustache and rides around ina car. Like Mussolini,
he is dressed in brown.

The story of Varlam Arabidze’s deeds is indeed familiar
to people who know the taste of Stalin’s poisoned deeds.
Like Stalin, Varlam builds his power on paranoia. Var-
lam imprisons people at random — all those with the
same last name, for instance. He is highly suspicious of
artists, of members of the intelligentsia. In this respect,
he sends his oprichnik-like troops to arrest Sandro
Barateli, a free-thinking artist who objects to the use of a
church for scientific experiments on the grounds that the
experiments are destroying an ancient monument of
Christianity.

Repentance tells the story of Sandro’s daughter,
Ketevan, who, as a young girl, lived through the arrest of
both her father and mother. When Varlam dies, she digs
up his grave, saying that she cannot rest while he remains
entombed. She cannot stand the fact that the lies of
society are buried. Varlam is hailed as a great figure, and
she knows that that is not true.

What we see is that Varlam’s son, Abel, and his wife,
Guliko, who, as the mayor’s heirs, lead a materially
affluent life, do not want to face the truth of what
Varlam’s deeds really were. Abel defends his father. He
declares that his father was always working toward the
common good. He declares that his father never killed
anyone with his own hands.

Symbolically, Ketevan represents the attempt to expose
the truth that everyone else tries to conceal. From per-
sonal experience, she knows what a tyrant Varlam was.
Unlike countless other people, she is not afraid to utter
the truth. Hers is a battle with the many, many forces that
want to stifle the truth about a vicious dictator.

Abel, Varlam’s son, insists that his father was a good
ruler who always had the common interest at heart. The
court that tries Ketevan for her “crime” of digging up
Varlam’s body wants to convict her as a criminal or as a
madwoman. This is exactly the pattern that Alice Miller
outlined in Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: society blames the
person who sees the truth for crying out that truth.
Society, in its attempt to protect the lies, does its best to

28 ~=This title is derived from combining Dostoevsky’s “Poor Folk” (“Bednye liudi”) and Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman” (“Mednyji vsadnik’). A
subsection of this section, called “Bronze People” (“Mednye liudi”), combines the titles of the same two works of nineteenth-century Russian

literature.
29 Pushkinskii dom, p.248.

muzzle the person who cries out that the emperor is
wearing no clothes.

Like Pushkin House, Repentance concentrates on the
dictator’s disastrous imprint on subsequent generations.
Abel, like Leva Odoevtsev’s father, has lost his sense of
morality. In a surrealistic sequence in which Abel con-
fronts his feelings, he is told by a God/devil figure who
resembles Varlam, “You pulverize anyone that stands in
your way.” Like Leva’s father, Abel will do anything to
further his career and to protect his personal security. He
admits, finally, that his life has been a void cultivated in
order to avoid facing the essential big questions — who
are we? why were we born? — that define a life of
purpose.

In Repentance, as in Pushkin House, the suffering of
the generation of the grandchildren is shown with par-
ticular poignancy. Ketevan, or Keti, Barateli has been
left an orphan at an early age and is literally ostracized
from society — in one scene, she is placed in a cage —
for maintaining her integrity. Tornike, Varlam’s
grandson, begins by defending his family’s honor. He
shoots at the unknown criminal who has been defiling his
grandfather’s grave. We surmise from later events that he
had been using the gun that his grandfather had given
him.

As events unfold, and as Tornike learns Keti’s story,
he begins to question his family’s version of life. He asks
Abel whether he had known about Varlam’s criminal
deeds. Abel tells his son that Varlam had done no wrong.
He tells Tormike that the times had been complicated.
Tornike believes that the time factor is irrelevant because
the issue is one of basic human right and wrong. He
believes that his family must accept guilt rather than try
to justify Varlam. An intense confrontation between
father and son ends with Abel’s slapping his son across
the face rather than admitting that Varlam may have been
the perpetrator of evil.

The ideas in Alice Miller’s book live on. Tornike is
rejected by his father because he told the truth and be-
cause his father had to protect the distortions that his
father had unleashed on society. The damage to Tornike
is lethal. He shuts himself up in his room and shoots
himself, with the very gun that his grandfather, Varlam,
had given to him. Varlam’s gift to society and to his
family was violence. As in Bitov’s Pushkin House, if the
first ring is rotten, the ones that pile up on it will also be
rotten. Leva Odoevtsev dies a violent death, murder
victim in a pistol duel. Tornike Arabidze dies a violent

Ellen Chances

death, victim of suicide, or self-murder. In Pushkin
House and Repentance, the poisoned heritage of a dic-
tator, two generations later, continues to poison society.

Speaking about his film, Abuladze asserted, “...in
Repentance, the victim was an entire people. What does
Abel’s son and Varlam’s grandson, our son and our
grandson, say: “Haven’t you gotten sick and tired of so
much lying? How long will you go on reassuring your-
self with lies?’ These words had been tormenting me for
a long time, for a long time even before the idea for the
film came to me. I understood that I must shoot the film
for young people, in order to free myself and them from
the addiction to lies.”°°

Both Bitov and Abuladze indict the dictators for turning
their backs on artists, those creatures who are among
society’s most precious inhabitants. For writer and direc-
tor alike, in killing the creative intelligentsia, the dictator
strikes a blow at divinity. Pushkin House plots the
demise of the divine spark of the poet, as Bitov draws an
analogy between Modest Platonovich (literally, son of
Platon, or Plato) and Alexander Pushkin, author of a
poem, “Prorok” (“The Prophet”), that sings of the poet’s
divine nature. “Repentance” chronicles the murder of the
artist Sandro, who, in the film’s visual imagery, is likened
to Christ. In one sequence, Sandro is shown in white,
barefooted, hanging, like the crucified figure of Christ.

Abuladze’s movie ends with a scene that is highly
charged with symbolism. The adult Keti is shown baking
cakes and decorating them with flowers and churches.
An old woman comes up to the window and asks, “Does
this road lead to the church?” Keti answers, “This is
Varlam Street. It will not take you to a church.” The old
woman’s response is, “Then what’s the use of it? What’s
the use of a road if it doesn’t lead toa church?” Ina sick
society, a person’s only contact with spirituality is in the
guise of sugary, ephemeral churches that dissolve and are
literally gobbled up.

Etermal, authentic values, for Abuladze and for Bitov,
have been twisted out of shape. In the upside down, topsy
turvy world shaped by Varlam, Abel — rather than Cain
— is the traitor. Varlam (a Georgian variant of
Balaam)>! — rather than the true God — is the leader.
In the false world of Pushkin House shaped by Stalin,
cultural monuments are distorted. “Poor People” become
“Bronze People.” Mitishatievs — rather than Modest
Platonoviches — rule the institutes where creative
studies of literature should be contemplated.

30 “Ia sdelal etot fil’m dlia molodykh...’"Alla Gerber conversation with Tengiz Abuladze, Iunost’,No.5,1987,p.82.

31 lam thankful to Joseph Corintelli for pointing this out to me.

The Harriman Institute Forum

Abuladze, in discussing Repentance, stated, “Faith is ...
the acknowledgement of those eternal ethical norms
which human consciousness has worked out. ... Can we
really renounce eternal values? Ideally we try to develop
them...” Bitov’s and Abuladze’s creative forays into
the land of Stalin’s heritage make impassioned cries for
truth. Like Alice Miller, these two artists affirm that a
society whose adults breed and defend lies will end up
with offspring whose psyches are seriously damaged.
And, sadly, eternal values are the sorry victims as the liars
do their best to promote their warped vision of reality.

Ellen Chances is professor of Russian and Soviet
literature and culture at Princeton University. During
1988-89, she was a Senior Fellow at the Harriman In-
stitute. She is the author of Conformity’s Children: An
Approach to the Superfluous Manin Russian Literature.
Her book, The Ecology of Inspiration: The Shapes of
Andrei Bitov’s Prose, is forthcoming in the series,
Studies of the Harriman Institute. She has published on
Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Kharms, Nabokov, Balmont, and
Mayakovsky.

The Forum is grateful to Professor Allan Wildman,
editor of Russian Review, for permission to print this
article, a version of which is forthcoming in that journal.

The Harriman Institute Forum is published monthly by
The W. Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union, Columbia University.
Editor: Leslie Auerbach
Assistant Editors: Gordon N. Bardos, Joshua Larson
Copyright ©1991 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York

All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of any kind without written permission is strictly prohibited
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32 Abuladze, “Ta sdelal etot film...,”pp.84-5.

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